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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Both Koreas and both Chinas had brutal dictators. On one side was the right wingers, on the other side was the Commies. Who managed their country better?
Who gave their country a better future between Castro and Pinochet?
edited 28th Nov '16 8:59:55 PM by MonsieurThenardier
"It is very easy to be kind; the difficulty lies in being just."Not Pinochet. Seriously, you keep trying to give him credit for the work of those who came after him. Pinochet gutted the Chilean middle class and turned the poor into the destitute. It was an economic disaster, that the government after him had to spend years and years sorting out.
Pinochet did not give Chile a future. The succession of democratic presidents after Pinochet gave Chile a future.
Seriously, if whoever succeeds the Castro brothers manages to build something atop their ruins, are you suddenly going to give the Castros credit? I doubt it, and you shouldn't have to.
No they didn't. His successors had to reimpose a whole swathe of regulations in order to reconstruct the middle class and aid the poor who Pinochet had left devastated. Pinochet's "reforms" helped no one but himself and his supporters, while leaving the rest of the country poorer than ever.
edited 28th Nov '16 9:03:36 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar
Fact: most of Chile's subsequent improvements in average standards of living were not due to reduced inequality, but rather general economic growth catalyzed by those policies.
edited 28th Nov '16 9:08:50 PM by MonsieurThenardier
"It is very easy to be kind; the difficulty lies in being just."That's why former leftwing dictatorships like Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic are so much poorer than former rightwing dictatorships like Portugal, right? Oh wait.
The cherrypicking is real.
Guys, I hate to interrupt, but since this is the US Politics thread, you might want to take this discussion somewhere else
to continue it.
Hey, random question. Were you the one who blamed Cuba's economic slump on the US embargo earlier? 'Cause that's straight up counterfactual.
edited 28th Nov '16 9:14:46 PM by MonsieurThenardier
"It is very easy to be kind; the difficulty lies in being just."You may or may not have noticed this—Pinochet's been out of power for a long time now. Chile's current success has nothing to do with him, and everything to do with those who came after him and cleaned up the mess he left behind. Castro, conversely, just died. To compare Chile right now to Cuba right now is a crock and you know it. Frankly to compare them at all, given that Chile was under a dictatorship for seventeen years, and Cuba for half a century is a crock in and of itself.
If you were interested in a more honest comparison you'd compare Chile at the time that Pinochet was forced from office, to Cuba at the time. And if you were to look at that Chile—and actually look at it, rather than just reading GDP numbers like they mean something—you'd find staggering poverty and income inequality, coupled with copious amounts of graft and cronyism. You'd find the majority of Chileans getting poorer, and experiencing exactly zero benefit from the junta's policies. And if you extrapolate from those trends into the future, you'd see the problem only getting worse—indeed, the fact that Chile is better than Cuba has everything to do with the brevity of the dictatorship, rather than the policies that it implemented.
For Chile to get to where it is now, required the entire system of corruption that Pinochet had set up to be disassembled so that the wealth could go places outside his own damn bank account. That you're so hellbent on giving him the credit for the achievements of those who succeeded him and cleaned up his mess is honestly a little disturbing here.
Bull. Put all the graft from the Pinochet regime back in place and then tell me how great it is to live in Chile.
Seriously, you're wanting to give Pinochet credit for successes that have nothing to do with him, and everything to do with those who fixed the system after he broke it.
...And social safety nets and regulations were reimposed to help those he'd screwed over. Fact is Pinochet did not build a functioning system and your continued efforts to measure "economic success" in terms of "money earned" rather than "lives improved" is an attempt to ignore that.
edited 28th Nov '16 9:18:13 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar
Trump Chooses Tom Price for Secretary of Health and Human Services
Just a reminder of his views...
Voted NO on expanding the Children's Health Insurance Program. (Jan 2009)
Voted YES on overriding veto on expansion of Medicare. (Jul 2008)
Voted NO on giving mental health full equity with physical health. (Mar 2008)
Voted NO on Veto override: Extend SCHIP to cover 6M more kids. (Jan 2008)
Voted NO on adding 2 to 4 million children to SCHIP eligibility. (Oct 2007)
Voted NO on requiring negotiated Rx prices for Medicare part D. (Jan 2007)
Voted YES on denying non-emergency treatment for lack of Medicare co-pay. (Feb 2006)
Repeal any federal health care takeover. (Jul 2010)
Deauthorize funding for Obamacare. (Jul 2010)
Repeal the Job-Killing Health Care Law. (Jan 2011)
Draining that swamp....
New Survey coming this weekend!
Ever heard of Apartheid South Africa? It was embargoed by the US, the EU, and the Soviet Union. Nobody gave them subsidies and it couldn't even import enough oil to fulfill domestic needs. The actual effect of this nearly global embargo and international sanctions was estimated to have cost the South Africa economy 1.3% of its GDP per year.
When the USSR stopped giving them subsidies, 1/3 of Cuba's GDP just disappeared over the course of three years.
edited 28th Nov '16 9:38:21 PM by MonsieurThenardier
"It is very easy to be kind; the difficulty lies in being just."...You genuinely don't understand this, do you? "Growth" is irrelevant. It does not matter how much money came into the country when that money ended up concentrated in a few hands, and aided no one.
Pinochet does not get credit for making Chile a better place because he did not make Chile a better place. "Growth" is not a magic word.
...No. It would not have. Because Pinochet not only did not put policies in place to help the poor, but actively tried to prevent them from being better off. "Growth" does not benefit people when the system is explicitly designed to prevent them from benefiting, and with the unions strangled or under military control, and a junta in power that actively encouraged corporations to pay slave wages, no one's life is going to get better. The removal of Pinochet was instrumental in the economic improvements of the nineties being able to benefit anybody outside of a select few.
Yeah, because a spike beginning at the end of his regime after years of stagnation and contraction is totally due to him. Seriously, his regime saw economic inequality widen and most people get poorer, yet your still want to give him credit for what happened after he was gone.
I honestly don't even know where to start with this statement. I'll try though.
Cuba has never been a democratic society. It was a Spanish colony for far longer than the rest of Central and South America, then suffered under a succession of American-backed despots (including Batista) before coming under Castro's rule. There's no tradition of democratic rule in Cuba, and barring a revolutionary movement, inertia keeps the dictators in place.
Pinochet, conversely, overthrew a democratically elected government in a nation with a long tradition of democratic government. Said traditions and Chile's well-ingrained democratic culture was always, from day one, going to put a deadline on how long the dictatorship could last. When Pinochet failed to rig the referendum he had no choice but to step down, not because he wanted to honour his promises, but because all the resistance he'd been suppressing up to this point was now bound to boil over.
For you to try and use this as some sort of evidence that Pinochet, as a person, was better than Castro as a person, actually approaches being insulting to the Chilean population. Pinochet was forced from power because Chile has a long tradition of democracy, and the populace was not going to take it after a certain point. For you to try and take that agency from the Chilean people and give it to Pinochet...I don't even know what to say there.
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"You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious."
Figured I'd refer to something besides Hamilton for a change.
edited 28th Nov '16 9:48:12 PM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprisedGuys, as interesting as this is (And as baseless as Thenardier's alternate history speculations may be given that he seems to think that the right wing approach is always the more correct course regardless of context or actual efficacy) this is not talking about US politics. If there's not another thread where this is appropriate I'm sure you two can make one.
Kind of wish we had people from Cuba and Chile here so we could ask them who they thought was the shittier dictator. But yeah, I agree this is veering off-topic. The only way this would be U.S. Politics would be if President (Emperor) Trump invades and annexes Cuba.
edited 28th Nov '16 9:54:33 PM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprisedI also very much doubt Castro would listen to calls from his people to step down in the same situation. Not to say Pinochet is more altruistic than him. Just smarter.
Anyway, I think this is a waste (and off-topic). We're obviously not going to see eye to eye on what the other sees as objective reality.
"It is very easy to be kind; the difficulty lies in being just."I'll try to keep this shorter than previous posts, and better tie it back to the topic of the thread. Because I do think there are some lessons that American politics, especially right now, can take from this discussion.
No it isn't. See below. The removal of social and economic policies that were explicitly aimed at harming the poorest of the poor was vital to letting people enjoy the fruits of the economic boom.
I like how you conveniently ignore the presence of Pinochet's actively malicious social and economic programming. The oh-so precious growth of the 90s and the poverty reduction that emerged from it cannot be attributed to him, because if Pinochet's social policies had been left in place, nobody else would have benefited from it.
The reason the economic boom of the nineties could help the poor was in large part because employers no longer had Pinochet in back of them. During the dictatorship, the military actively suppressed unions, prevented employers from having to negotiate with labour, and ensured wages did not have to go up, because anybody who complained or advocated for better wages could easily wind up in prison. The dictatorship's existence acted as a negative force, holding down the ability of Chile's most desperate to do anything to improve their lives. Had the dictatorship remained in place it is highly unlikely that any of the benefits of the economic boom would have reached them. The simple act of removing the dictatorship—even before the new governments put new social programming into place—freed Chile's poor to once more take advantage of the benefits of the market, something they were actively denied an opportunity to do under the dictatorship. You can keep citing that World Bank report all you want but it's irrelevant because the Chile it is discussing is one that had an economic boom post-dictatorship. Leave the dictatorship in place, and that report will read very differently.
To bring this back around to the topic of the thread, you see similar things play out in so-called "right to work states". The presence of a government that is actively anti-union and pro-management holds down wages, increases economic inequality, and otherwise prevents people at the bottom of the social and economic ladder from gaining any sort of benefit from what economic improvements there are. It's not just about an absence of social programming to help people—it's about an economic system that actively and maliciously harms those at the bottom.
And my point is that this has nothing to do with Pinochet himself and everything to do with a Chilean political culture that would not tolerate a permanent dictatorship. Pinochet knew from Day 1 of the junta that he would eventually have to hold a referendum, or be forced from office violently. That's why he did it—not because he was a better person than Castro, or even because he was a smarter person than Castro, but because from the word "Go" any dictatorship in Chile, a traditionally democratic nation with no history of tolerating juntas, was going to have an expiry date. He still did everything in his power to rig that election, and it was the ability of the Chilean public to resist his efforts that toppled him from power, and left him with no option but to back down or face revolt not only from the populace, but from less radical elements in the armed services.
In contrast, Castro was never going to be put in that position because Castro took over a country with no tradition of democratic government. There was no built in deadline to Castro's dictatorship, because Cuban political culture was, from the start, far more willing to tolerate a dictatorship than Chilean political culture was. For you to try and make this about Pinochet and Castro personally is therefore pointless, because we cannot, with any real accuracy, say what Castro would have been like had he been ruling a nation with Chile's history of democratic governance.
To again bring this back to the topic of the thread, in four years there will be an election in the United States. That election will not be held because Donald Trump is an inherently democratic personality who has more respect for the public's rights than the likes of Vladimir Putin. It will happen because American political culture will not tolerate Trump actually declaring himself dictator. He can gerrymander. He can try to rig elections even. But he cannot simply dissolve the electoral process, or even rig the system to the degree that his hero, Putin, does. It's simply not something that the American populace, even on the right, is liable to stand for.
If there is anything positive to be taken from the example of Pinochet's Chile, that would have to be—that even the worst dictators, backed by the military, the corporate establishment, the upper class, and the Church, cannot fully suppress democracy in a nation with a proud tradition of it. The United States, for all its many historical problems, has never been a dictatorship. Trump can try all he wants to change that. He can even try to transition the USA into an illiberal democracy in the vein of Russia. What he cannot do, however, is remove your history of democratic leadership, and your demands for elections. So long as you stick to that, you'll eventually get rid of him, and eventually remove any illiberalism he injects into the system. At least that is my profound hope and belief.
A nation's political culture is, in many ways, one of the most important things about it. What the populace is prepared to tolerate can, and forever will, restrict what an illiberal or even dictatorial leader can do to the nation and those within it.
Also congrats, my fellow Californios.
We just achieved a democratic supermajority in both our Senate and legislative state houses .
California is either the future of America or it's going to be the last bastion of freedom.
edited 28th Nov '16 10:37:35 PM by MadSkillz

EDIT: Except that Pinochet didn't actually create the system. The economy under Allende had already started to recover at the time of his coup. More to the point, Pinochet doesn't get a cookie for bringing in money and using it to enrich himself and a few friends at the cost of everyone else. At the end of his regime, Chile's poorest citizens were poorer than they had been under Allende and the middle class had contracted massively because so much money was going to Pinochet's allies, and none to anybody else.
Pinochet stepped down after doing everything in his power to intimidate his opponents and rig the system. He then stepped down rather than face the revolt he knew would come for breaking the promises he'd made in the first place. It has nothing to do with altruism.
edited 28th Nov '16 8:56:45 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar